Is there anything happening with this as head is still 1.7.12-k which is very far behind the latest intel download which is 1.9.7?

I'm sorry that investigation of this panic reported by Jeff took so long. The root cause has been identified - ixl_queue_hang_check function is triggering IRQs while queue is processed by ixl_handle_que task which leads to unsynchronized accesses to lro. I'm running some basic performance tests on the patch updating the review.